Wednesday, May 06, 2009

Watching videos

I'm fascinated by what my children find interesting.

Every night, my daughter and I settle in my bed for our bedtime routine with the laptop. We read all the websites in the LOLCats franchise, then we check out the videos on wimp.com, which bills itself as featuring the best videos on the Internet. And you know what? It does have many great videos on a variety of topics. I get a little tired of the manic Japanese game show clips, though a few can be funny, and he's overdoing it with the Britain's Got talent clips, but we see a lot of interesting stuff about animals, people, and machines. Very often, watching the clips leads my daughter and me to have conversations about life and human nature. She loves videos about card tricks, magic tricks, and hidden cameras where people are put in difficult interpersonal situations (i.e., watching a clerk act in a racist manner towards another customer), and we can see how they respond.

Here are a few we've watched recently:

Pranking people with water. Some of the pranks were funny, but Sophie was quick to identify when they started to go a little too far, like in the last prank when the man was being honored, and then he was pranked. She said, "He felt proud, but then he fell in the water and felt the opposite of proud."

Ping pong ball tricks. Sophie claims to have been bored, but Eric (whom we showed it to the next night) loved it. I was impressed.

Mythbusters on the Giant Lego Ball. Another one we showed to Eric. We all love Legos in our family, so it was very interesting to the kids, especially when ... well, when they busted the myth. Watch it. :)

Parasitic wasp controls caterpillar. The day after I saw this, I read an article about how a disease we get from cats can make humans more neurotic, and it made me wonder about the issue this clip raises: can parasitic beings control the minds/actions of the organisms they inhabit and what are the implications of this?